(Stevie) Brexit is off the agenda for the moment as it is now slowly dawning on people that maybe Boris is not quite the wholesome jolly fellow they thought he was, or, if they didn't but thought it didn't matter, they think it does now, a bit more at least. The front of Private Eye invites us to enjoy the carnage as Johnson and Cummings beat the shit out of each other. No wonder Boris didn't sack Cummings after the latter's optical quest in County Durham. Cummings probably knows a lot and is nasty enough to use it. Come on, Dom, do 'im over. BTW I hope you know over there pondwise what I'm on about.

WTF? I knew Brexit was going to be bad but didn't think it would get to this point after just 4 months.

You are a mere slip of a gel and do not remember the Iceland debacle.

(Stevie) That wasn't a proper war, just a cod one. BTW you won' 'arf get it from pen.

[Rosie] Gunboats in the water, trawler nets cut. Isn't this the way the current contretemps is heading? Reads that way over here.

I know some of that was poly-ticks. Still, I am lost. I know there was an ostrich war and the ostriches won . . .

I'd much rather have dragees than dragoons.

Prefer a Snapdragon to all the above. Beautiful prolific garden stalwart.

A plague of greenfly upon all gardens! AaaaAAAAAAAHCHOOO!

I like dragonflies . . .

(KS) I hope you cook them first.

Just had lovely text message from my sis (who has undergone almost a year of surgery and recovery followed by shitty chemotherapy) and was having a follow-up with her oncologist this afternoon. "It's all gone!!!!!" Phew.

(pen) Great news. Your sister may take some time to recover from the treatment. I'm very glad I didn't need chemo - radio- and hormone therapy rather knocks you about a bit anyway but is much better than being dead. Much better.

[pen] good to hear :^)

Great to hear good news.

Thanks folks. Today is her birthday so she's giddy with excitement (even at the age of 53) and I've just eaten a LOT of cake (because, why not? I haven't seen any of them for almost a year and a half and still can't visit but we can have family solidarity through the medium of cake).

Does cake work better than Zoom?

Great news.

[pen] Great news about your sister, and also about the cake :)

[pan] Good stuff for both you and sis. All hail the power of cake. {see old Chris Morris videos}

[Rosie] Not like that! But you made me curious and I found out they are edible. I still have zero desire to eat them. They are pretty to see, though!

I'm pretty sure that it's exacerbated by enforced staying-stillness right now, but I have seriously itchy feet, so much so that I constantly have the marine traffic app window open as I work, and I watch the progress of ships through the day. Does anyone else get a massive feeling of wanderlust when the days get so long that it's still light at 10pm? I feel like buying a campervan and taking four or five months off work to mooch about this corner of the world seeing the people I've missed over the past year and a half. I've always got this feeling around now - particularly since a road trip into the Arctic Circle in midsummer 1995, then working on motor rallies with night stages in the north of Scotland, or driving through the night down the M4 to go camping in Cornwall... Midsummer (even though it's flipping chilly right now) is not meant for staying in. That is all.

[penelope] Not so much that I yearn to join the Merchant Navy. I do have genuinely itchy skin right now, which ius driving me nuts.

Where I live, it's never light at 10pm. Sunset MIGHT happen as late as 8pm . . .

[Stevie] But one can buy a passage on cargo ships as a non-working passenger. There used to be a website that listed the ships offering it and their destinations. I now know how I'm going to spend my next break from writing this dull thing today.
[KagomeS] If you ever get the opportunity to make a road trip, drive north (a long way north) in midsummer. It's fabulous.

I like summer morning walks over the meadows before 5am. I saw a deer last week, which I never saw there before in many years of living here.

[Raak] Impressed. I thought 6:30am is an early time for a walk. The lack of people at that time allows a lot of wildlife to be spotted. I often see muntjac deer and hares.

I’m lucky. I saw hares in the field behind the house from bed this morning, and watched buzzards riding the thermals from the kitchen window as I was making pizza last night.

[pen] that must be one hot pizza oven to produce buzzard bearing thermals via your windows!

(Boolbar) ROFLMAO. This is why we have Global Warming.

Traveling the world by tramp steamer is a staple of my secret vice - the Call of Cthulhu RPG. Pre-website, one had to use a shipping agent.

Hidden text

Of course, inevitably the ship would be becalmed in dense fog or lost in the Bermuda Triangle or fetch up on the rocky shore of an island newly risen from the stygian depths and then the screaming would generally start and only I would survive bwahaha

[pen] Unless there are some MAJOR upgrades to cars, it's goig to take a lot more than driving to get to where it is light past 10pm for me!

[Boolbar] *<nods>* Were I to observe thermal-riding buzzards o'erhead I might suspect a roof fire. I was once driven from Mrs Stevie's gas barbecue by a very threatening praying mantis, all of 1 inch long.

How it reached the pedals with its tiny legs remains a mystery.

(KagShuk) Even here in the south of England there is quite a lot of light at 10 pm BST (9 pm GMT) and in the north of Scotland it barely gets dark in June, given a clear sky.

Ay, why wud ye want the dark anyhoo, tis only fer miscreants ter get oop ter evil deeds in (Playing Calvinist card kept from my NZ upbringing)

Shurely the dark is the bist time to have six.

I lived up near Sunderland for a while, and what the summer days lacked in warmth, they made up in length.

That, I'm afraid, is a false equivalence. The same could be said for winter at the North Pole or even southern England.

[Rosie] Well, that's nice, but I live in the United States. I find that it even gets dark fairly early in the northern states. I don't know about Canada, but I've heard that it's around 8pm or 9pm at the latest when it gets dark there.

(KS) The 49th parallel misses us by some way. The latitude of my place is 51.318 and Edinburgh and Glasgow are not far of 56°N. The clocks are an hour ahead of the Greenwich meridian in summer but not in winter. There are few things more gloomy than a cloudy December afternoon in Britain. Pretty well dark at 4 pm.

From 30-odd degrees last week to 18-odd degrees this week. Honestly, I am struggling to know what to wear [to sit at my desk at home alone all day except for a dog walk but I do know that those comfy old shorts are going in the bin - I caught sight of my reflection and recoiled I tell you. ]

[pen] I often feel like I need three to four different sets of clothes to bring along with me everywhere, each day, when out and about in Southwest Louisiana or Southeast Texas.

So, any plans for this weekend, peeps?

[pen] Worked. Took a break to watch a football game so it wasn't quite all work and no play.

(Chalky) Fair enough. But what are you doing up at quarter past six in the morning? 0615 hrs simply does not exist in any way, shape or form.

[Rosie] awake but not up.

(Chalky) Ah! Unlike me before midday then - up but not awake.

[Rosie] that anomaly in Canada/US seems to have seen record temperatures increase locally not by the odd degree C, but by ten or so. Ever seen that elsewhere?

The weather in the U.S. had definitely been strange.

(Bismarck) Well, five, actually but even that is quite something and I'm not aware of anywhere in the world whose record has been busted by such a large margin. Having said that, one needs to be extremely rigorous in investigating the circumstances of any weather record. How long has the site been operating? Is the site representative of the area? Has it become built-up? Are the instruments reliable? Is the observer honest? That may all sound a bit dampening but it's absolutely necessary if the figures are to be put into historical context. I'd like to read some scientific articles about the heatwave; they should be appearing pretty soon. Certainly ignore the media who all have their agendas, one of which is to attract readers.

Waiting for enormous amounts of water to come gushing down the Rhine/Rijn through the Netherlands in the next couple of days. They're estimating record flows.

Belgium is under water. It's been raining for weeks. Aaaand it's St Swithin's Day.

(Bis) Well, it was here, yesterday. Isn't the Belgian equivalent St Godelieve, whose day was 6 July. It's bollocks, I tell you, like all weatherlore.

[Rosie] Wet bollocks innit? 'Ash before oak' and all that. (I didn't notice which was first this year, despite walking out every day past both kinds of trees...)

That's a safe assumption for any 'wise' saying that you can reverse engineer from just a couple of words. I wondered if the word 'soak' was going to show up in the rest of the rhyme before even looking it up. Imagine my amazement when I discovered it did.

(pen, Bismarck) This is quite a big one but European summer floods occur every now and then. Technical explanation here.. (V heavy going - don't bother). The world's a warmer place but whether that had anything to do with it is the subject of great debate. After all, Lynmouth was swept into the sea in 1604, 1769 and 1952 and it'll certainly happen again. The first two dates were in the Little Ice Age, when it was cooler and stormier.

Worth celebrating?

We sold our house in France earlier this year, which broke my heart, because I loved the place. BUT I am relieved not to have to worry any more about it being underwater. In 2016, we came within about 50cm of having the Seine fill our basement rooms floor to ceiling.

To have kept such a house would have been in-seine.

[RTG] Almost.

(CdM) That's a bit too close.
(RTG) No good. Pi=355/113. Even better pi = the fourth root of 2143/22.

It may be 2:42 in the morning where I am, but I need dark chocolate and am going to eat some and I don't care if anybody cares.

(KagShu) Very gratifying to note that I am not the only nutcase here though I must say I prefer brandy at that time of night.

[KS] Whatever gets you through the night. For me, it's not usually chocolate (that would involve climbing stairs and I usually eat it before bed anyway) but quite often another half-hour episode of Agatha Christie's Poirot is in order.

Couldn’t sleep last night at all. Blamed on the Covid jab for want of anything else, and on the anti-apnoea device. It’s a real bugger to be a light sleeper like me.

I usually have no problems getting off to sleep, it is the waking up at sparrow's fart and not being able to get back off to sleep that is wearing. Perhaps I ought to accept 4 to 5 hours at night plus one after a nice lunch is enough at my age. My eyes disagree.